Thursday, February 28, 2008

VirtualBox on Mac saved me !!

Recently I quit Oracle and therefore I re-imaged my MacBook Pro to get rid of VMWare and few other such baggages I was carrying along with I lost my virtual machines with Oracle 10g database installed.

Renny was stuck with some Oracle Stored Procedure issue and she wanted to get Oracle 10g running on my laptop. And I had 0 time to get it going. There have not been any Mac releases of Oracle Database lately. So I am momentarily stuffed.

My options were to get VMWare Fusion, Q.app (qemu for Mac) or VirtualBox. Last time I tried VirtualBox I was getting error when I startup the guest OS. But thought will it a try ...

There comes VirtualBox to wrap Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, Oracle XE 10g. All took about 30 minutes to get started, incl. downloads. I preferred to run only the database from within the guest OS and run Eclipse, SQL Developer etc from Host OS which is Mac OS X in this case. Now the stumble was with the networking in VirtualBox which by default is NAT/NAPT. So no IP Address assigned to host OS so that I can make a TCP connection from host to guest (whereas vice-versa works fine).

Bit of a Googling and the VirtualBox User Manual introduces me to VBoxManage using which you can add port forwarding to guest OS settings whereby a port connection on host is forwarded to mapped port on guest. So using following commands I was able to set this up for TNS listener and worked like a charm when tested with SQL Developer running on host.

VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu 7.10" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/tns/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu 7.10" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/tns/GuestPort" 1521
VBoxManage setextradata "Ubuntu 7.10" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/tns/HostPort" 1521


All is good that ends good .. And they lived happily ever after !!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

I like to see Groovy to be something like Forte 4GL

Forte 4GL (known later as Unified Development Server [UDS]) as the name says a Fourth Generation Language. The language used is Transaction Object Oriented Language (TOOL). Sun Microsystems bought this from Forte Inc. and I would say sun set on this now.

Take a look at the TOOL Reference Manual to see how simple and easy the semantics are. The complete documentation set is available at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/S1_UnifiedDevelopmentServer_35.

Coming to the point, I like to see Java mature to a stage where it can complement Groovy to be a 4GL and have tools to develop applications like how it is done using Forte Workshop.

Forte Workshop (IDE) got to its own proprietary Version Control, Configuration Management and Middleware container. The above said tool could be based on Eclipse (IDE), Subversion (Version Control), OSGI (Configuration Management) and Apache Felix + EJB (Middleware container).

Only if someone could kick start something like this ..

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Keywords I like to cover during IT session to our church folks

basic internet, virus, firewall
ADSL flavors, IP Phony, Skype
podcasts, simulcasts, webcasts,Feeds, RSS, ATOM google services
portal, Web 2, Ajax, RIA, Blogging, wiki
DVI, HDMI, Media Station, HD DVD, HD TV, Blue Ray
USB, Firewire, PCMCIA

I am well fed with these !!